WARWICK — More than 150 people packed into a township building meeting room Wednesday night to find out how much they don’t know about a pipeline proposed to cut through a stretch of the Hopewell Big Woods and their backyards.

Alerted by requests to survey her property, Mount Pleasant Road resident Amy Shenk began contacting neighbors, township officials and activists and by Wednesday night, the meeting room at the Warwick Township building on Route 23 was filled to the point that people were looking in through the door.

What they heard was a collection of officials and activists explain to them the difficult and circuitous road they face in trying to stop a natural gas transmission pipeline that will cut straight through Berks and Chester counties, and could cross no less than four exceptional value streams in northern Chester County alone.

“This is a huge, huge project,” Lynda Farrell, project coordinator for the Kennett Square-based Pipeline Safety Coalition, said of the proposed Commonwealth Pipeline — 120 miles of 30-inch pipeline extending from Lycoming County to several points of interconnection in southeastern Pennsylvania with other interstate pipelines.

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The pipeline was proposed to carry natural gas produced by Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formations in the northern and western portions of the state.

This is the gas produced by the controversial drilling method known as “fracking,” by which water and a slurry of toxic chemicals are pumped into formations of shale rock to “fracture” them and release the small pockets of gas trapped within.

This gas boom has also produced a boom in proposals for new pipelines, 13 throughout the three-state region of the Delaware River Watershed, according to Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper.

“Essentially, pipelines are coming and we need to focus on what we can do to help make sure they come by making smart decisions,” state Rep. Tim Hennessey, R-23rd Dist., told the crowd.

“There are better places to put this pipeline than where they are proposing,” Hennessey said. “Some of you may be asking why does it have to go there at all. Well, it may be the most efficient or economical way, but that doesn’t mean it’s the proper way or the best way. There are already existing rights of way.”

“If it is going to come through, we want to make it as safe and environmentally effective for all of us if we can,” added state Rep. Becky Corbin, R-155th Dist.

It would have to cross two branches of French Creek and “three separate sections of Rock Run Creek,” Jacob said.

Jacob said Chester County Planning Commission Director Ron Bailey told a recent meeting of the Northern Federation of Chester County that the federal agency which oversees the siting of the pipeline “wants to promote pipelines. Their main goal is to see and make pipelines happen and they have no interest and don’t care what the county or local government thinks about it.”

Farrell, who outlined a pipeline proposal’s potential stops along the way as part of what she called, “Pipelines 101,” and warned the packed room the process, “couldn’t be more confusing if they tried.”

“In this process, the public is at a big disadvantage,” van Rossum said. “FERC is not about protecting the environment or the community.”

Because Commonwealth is an “interstate” pipeline, because of its connections to pipelines carrying natural gas over state lines, FERC is the first stop in the approval process, Farrell said.

West Vincent Township Manager Jim Wendelgass has quite a bit of experience with FERC, not only in his former life as a lawyer, but also as the manager of a township with no less than three major pipelines and two major pipeline compressor stations within its borders.

“In the park next to the township building, we have two pipelines going through, one of which dates back to World War II,” Wendelgass said.

In Ludwig’s Corner, Columbia and Texas Eastern pipeline compression stations are “right across the street from each other, one of which is in Upper Uwchlan,” he said.

“We have one that goes right through Ludwig’s Corner, next to the Weatherstone development with 270 homes, the new library and a brand new elementary school,” he said.

He said right now, the Commonwealth Pipeline proposal is in the “informal process” so no one has the right to information or materials yet.

From that point forward, townships, citizens and activists have only 21 days to apply to “intervene,” the agency’s word for being involved in the process and having rights to all the information related to it.

“There are not a lot of major things that happen with people’s lives in 21 days,” he said wryly.

“If you intervene, you can get all the information and you have right to appeal, but if you wait, you run the risk that you will lose some rights” as they relate to the project approval, Wendelgass said.

Although it is extremely difficult, pipeline proposals can be successfully diverted, he said.

He pointed to the case of the proposed Dominion Pipeline that would have gone through East Vincent, West Vincent, West Pikeland, Charlestown and East Whiteland which was defeated, due, in part, to joining with opponents of the pipeline in Lancaster County.

Eventually, the gas meant for the pipeline was diverted into an expanded pipeline in York County.

Joining together with opponents outside your immediate area increases your influence and your ability to have an impact on the application, van Rossum told the crowd.

“In a neighbor against neighbor battle, the pipeline wins,” she said.

The company will be required to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, but this is most often done, with FERC approval, at a cursory level with a document called an Environmental Assessment.

Perhaps the first order of business, van Rossum said, is to organize to push for a full Environmental Impact Statement, which requires a much more in-depth look at the environmental impact of the pipeline, particularly where it crosses exceptional value streams.

It may also force a look at the potential impact on the habitat of the bog turtle, an endangered species that lives within the woods and streams the pipeline is proposed to traverse, said Jim Thorne, a naturalist with the Natural Lands Trust.

He called the pipeline’s potential a trigger for a review for compliance with the Endangered Species Act, “another federal nexus,” which could then also involve the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Thorne is an expert in the environs of the Big Woods, the largest and one of the last pieces of uninterrupted woodlands along the East Coast called The Highlands, which run from Connecticut to Maryland.

These woods, Thorne said, have been declared “a globally significant natural area” and, as such, should be afforded increased protection status. “If you cut a globally significant natural area in half with a pipeline, its value will diminish tremendously,” he said.

Although the fight to stop or have an impact on the path of the proposed pipeline is a hard path, it’s one worth following, said Karen Feridan of the organization Berks Gas Truth.

“No path is going to be easy on this,” she said, adding that the residents in the room had one distinct advantage — they were getting informed, involved and organized very early in the process.

“I’ve been to a million of these meetings and I haven’t seen this many people this early in the process either tonight or at last week’s township meeting,” she said.

Shenk said after the holidays, she hopes to organize those who signed up on the night’s mailing list into teams to tackle the many different issues the Commonwealth Pipeline proposal represents.